A lark born only for you

Soon these tears will have cried.

Hill Country

Talking about places between destinations.  Customs, ways of talk and instruments that your early ancestors gave up in their lifetimes are alive here.  Songs and dances and foods long dead exist here without much context or explanation.  Mixed memories and cultures exist among sentimental old people, annoyed children and interested outsiders.  Things our great-great grandparents did a hundred years ago out of necessity are forcibly pantomimed by mutinous fourteen year-olds today, without their knowing why.

You can brew coffee in an early 19th century German cabin with a grinder that still works the best.  You can try to make sense of a cemetery hidden in the woods, low stones like stumbling blocks with bits of fading cursive script in the shattered pieces.  Chimes hanging in the trees.  You can learn to play a violin and call it a fiddle when you get good.  You can cut wood and winnow things down.  You can splash in clear fresh water and identify a cardinal's call in the winter.  Men in cowboy hats and women in formal attire, with napkins and propriety, custom, identity, age and tenure, with no irony.  Museums full of stuffed animals long since culled from the field, who never should have been observed.  Long tracts of generational green growth and lonely medians filled with wildflowers, indian blankets and sunflowers in late summer.  Lazy rivers winding beside railroad tracks.  Empty roads buzzing with insects in the sunshine.  Paved but covered with dirt.

Deep suntans and craggy faces, people wiping sweat from hat bands, and accents.  Dropped t's and g's, ways of talk more endangered than the warblers.  People swimming topless in nameless creeks right next to the road, barns and cattle and sometimes horses.  Columns and regalia across the street from roadhouses, no signs, no comments.  Differing lifestyles blending together, ancient homes with satellite dishes, electric fences and chunks of stolen limestone marking every drive.  Leaning heritage oaks with crackling branches and Spanish moss, nailed bits of iron rotting away, noting something.  Try to import modernity.  It'll probably work.  They always say it won't, but it does.  You can make homage to the parts that you cherish, and hate the things you want to.  

Maybe it's time we got back.  You'll never understand it until you're in it, invited or not.